T2874 meteors on the moon
may14
Setup
observing notes
spectra
telescope position
Experiment setup
john matthews looked for meteor flashes on the moon. The
experiment used millstone hill and arecibo tracking the moon.
Millstone hill would transmit at 440 MHz for about 5 minutes each
hour.
The AO setup was:
- 430 dome receiver
- jpl horizon ephemeris file was used to track the moon.
- two 10 MHz bands. centered at 433 and 438 MHz
- mock spectrometers used in voltage sampling mode
- each 10 MHz band was sampled using:
- 8 bit i,q sampling.
- output was done using the pdev file format
- see pdev
file format for the output file format.
Observing notes
05may14:
- he receiver was warm for this run. Tsys was about 130
Kelvins.
- Start file:
/share/pdata[1,2]/pdev/t2874.20140505.b[0,1]s1g0.00300.pdev
- there were 178 files for each band in this scan
- All times below are approximate.. except the start time is
exact
- 16:11:13 (ast) start taking data (exact)
- 16:22:00 on the moon (about file 312)
- 16:44:xx haystack radar on for
awhile (very strong)
- 16:54:00 cal for 10 seconds (exact time)
- 17:34:05 start drifting off the moon
- 17:37
completely off the moon
- 17:38:xx back on the moon
- 17:51
millstone radar back on with moon in a null of the beam (to
reduce the ao signal)
- 18:17
tiepos 75 .. was tiepos 77 before
- 18:40
millstone hill was to come back on.
- 18:50:09 second scan started
(file .00500)
- 19:07
off the moon
- 19:09
cal for 10 secs
- done..
06may14
- 17:01:37 started scan file .00000.
- 17:05:00 cal on 10 seconds
- 17:xx datataking aborted. arun
was copying file off of the datataking machine
- 17:08:24: start scan .00100.. this ran for the entire run
- 17:35:xx : millstone transmits
- 18:08:00 10 sec cal on moon
- 18:35:xx millstone hill transmits
- 18:41:24 millstone radar off
- 18:52:00 stopped telescope tracking moon.. drift off.
- 18:55:xx drive back onto moon.
- 19:05:20 millstone radar on (not sure when
they turned on)
- 19:11:xx millstone radar off
- 19:46:18 hit max za.. moon moving out of beam
- 19:49:30 10 sec cal
- done...
Quick look at the
spectra:
The first 50 files of run (300-349 05may14, 100-149
06may14) were used to examine the spectral density.
The processing:
- 2^24 points from the start of each file were processed for the
first 50 files of scan 300.
- the 16 million points is about 1.6 seconds of data
- 8k fft's were done (1.2 Khz resolution), power computed and
then averaged for the 1.6 seconds
- Each 1.6 sec spectra were normalized to their median value
(Tsys).
The plots below show the 1.6 second average spectra from
the start of the first 50 files:
Notes on the spectra:
- Both days:
- rfi in polA looks a lot stronger than that in polB
- rms's on moon were 30 to 40 counts for 1 sigma in the 8 bit
digitizer.
- The cal temps are 95.5, 102.6 for polA, polB
- On the oscilloscope we saw rfi with 12 second periods
reflected off the moon.
- land base radars (in PR) have 12 second rotation period.
- I've seen ship based radars with 4 second rotation
periods.
- 05may14:
- moon come into beam during the 12th file : .00011.pdev
- Tsys was about 130 K off the moon.
- 06may14
- Tsys was about 80 K off the moon.
- file 121, 431.8MHz birdies starts drifting to higher
frequency.
- at file 149 it has moved about 1 MHz.
- This may be rfi from the sbn postamp chassis. in the 327
receiver we saw it drift by this amount (more
info)
- The rfi off the moon looks much stronger in polA than polB
(pols are circular).
- this may be real or just a difference in Tsys for the 2 pols
(when the dewar is warm.. need to check the cals).
processing: x101/14050[5,6]/moonjm.pro
The telescope position for the two runs was taken
from the telescope logfiles. These files have the encoder position
information dumped once a second.
Processing:
- model correction was removed from the az,za encoder values
- the az,za was backcomputed to ra,dec of date.
The plots show the telescope and
moon ephemeris position for the 2 days (.ps) (.pdf):
- Page 1: 05may14:
- Top: RA (of date) vs hour of day (UTC)
- black AO telescope
- red moon ephemeris file
- 2nd: DEC(of date) vs hour of day (UTC)
- black AO telescope
- red moon ephemeris file
- bottom: position error Asecond (great circle)
- Black RaEphm - RaTelescope
- the error was computed as:
(radif)*15*3600*cos(declination)
- red : decEphm - DecTel
- The error was computed at: (decDif)*3600
- at 21.6 the telescope tracking was stopped so the moon
drifted out of the beam
- . a few minutes later we drove back onto the moon.
- Page 2: 06may14 run.
- at 22.9 the telescope tracking was stopped so the moon
drifted out of the beam
- . a few minutes later we drove back onto the moon.
processing:
x101/140506/moonpos.pro
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